Arcadi Espada: "With my podcast I don't want to waste anyone's time"

The interview is by phone.

Arcadi Espada takes his time putting on his helmets.

He wants to be more comfortable.

It seems good to me, not because of his comfort, but above all because he is going to present his new podcast and I imagine that the headphones give him a more professional appearance.

More than announcer.

Announcer of what?

Let's see what he wants to tell us.

I had been behind this project for a long time. Longer than you think.

I am quite curious and had always been dizzy with the podcast.

And this incident that happened on Onda Cero, when they fired me for writing a column in this newspaper in which I talked about an ethical issue involving a man who works for a television channel called La Sexta, was the definitive push to see if it killed two birds with one stone: you do what you wanted to do and you go back to blabbering around. Is it a podcast born of revenge?! Nothing, nothing;

the podcast has nothing revenge on it.

Although the causes are ignoble, companies have every right to do without those who do not seem good.

I know exactly what world I live in.

Doing something of this nature as revenge would be a reduction in my morale and my budgets that has no place.

Revenge is a rather empty thing, it doesn't hold much interest for me. Do you have a reference podcast? I hear things from time to time.

The podcast I want to do has little to do with the podcasts that are made.

Well, with some yes... I could say "I want you to be inspired by this", but no, I don't have a clear reference. What are you going to do? It's a long podcast, it will last approximately three quarters of an hour and fifty minutes , will not arrive on time.

I will be accompanied by Yaiza Santos, a wonderful journalist and a good friend of mine, who knows well what I have written and my world of references.

We'll have a kind of conversation about politics, culture wars and all these issues that concern us.

But also with things that have to do with pleasures: with books, with food... Anyway,

with life beyond politics and wars.

When you're spinning the jar all day to earn a living, like me, well, in the end it always ends up as a surplus of things that doesn't fit anywhere, neither in the column nor in the blog, and that would be nice to turn it into a conversation, in a digression, where Yaiza punctuates the order of things in some way.

No controversy. No controversy?

I don't believe you. No, no;

without polemics, without arguing between us.

It doesn't matter to me that the things we say are controversial, you know, I say what I think and I don't stop to think if this is going to be controversial or not.

I want it to be a long, wide-ranging, weekly conversation.

It will go out on Fridays and it will be called

because in the end it always remains as a surplus of things that does not fit anywhere, neither in the column nor in the blog, and that would be good to turn it into a conversation, into a digression, where Yaiza punctuates in some way the order of the stuff.

No controversy. No controversy?

I don't believe you. No, no;

without polemics, without arguing between us.

It doesn't matter to me that the things we say are controversial, you know, I say what I think and I don't stop to think if this is going to be controversial or not.

I want it to be a long, wide-ranging, weekly conversation.

It will go out on Fridays and it will be called

because in the end it always remains as a surplus of things that does not fit anywhere, neither in the column nor in the blog, and that would be good to turn it into a conversation, into a digression, where Yaiza punctuates in some way the order of the stuff.

No controversy. No controversy?

I don't believe you. No, no;

without polemics, without arguing between us.

It doesn't matter to me that the things we say are controversial, you know, I say what I think and I don't stop to think if this is going to be controversial or not.

I want it to be a long, wide-ranging, weekly conversation.

It will go out on Fridays and it will be called

No controversy. No controversy?

I don't believe you. No, no;

without polemics, without arguing between us.

It doesn't matter to me that the things we say are controversial, you know, I say what I think and I don't stop to think if this is going to be controversial or not.

I want it to be a long, wide-ranging, weekly conversation.

It will go out on Fridays and it will be called

No controversy. No controversy?

I don't believe you. No, no;

without polemics, without arguing between us.

It doesn't matter to me that the things we say are controversial, you know, I say what I think and I don't stop to think if this is going to be controversial or not.

I want it to be a long, wide-ranging, weekly conversation.

It will go out on Fridays and it will be called

, like tango.

My friend José María Albert de Paco came up with the idea. It's a tango that talks about a lack of faith... don't you have faith too much? Man, faith, faith... [He laughs a lot] it's not that I have much .

Obviously

belongs to that desperate tango poetics.

It's something that has less to do with the concept of what tango is, which actually has little to do with me, but what I like is the flight of the title and the phrase.

Instead of saying

, like those of your generation, I have always said

.

He even sings the opening tune. It's just that I really like to sing tangos.

I know many tangos by heart, I like them.

Tango, in these absolutely puny times from the point of view of what freedom is, of saying what one thinks and saying it with humor, is so absolutely incorrect that it must be claimed at every step.

And this is not one of the most incorrect. With how

it is and makes a podcast instead of a Twitch, like Luis Enrique. No, no, I don't like that.

I have never seen Luis Enrique.

It seems to me that with these technological things and so on I am indeed a modern, a modern who listens

, which is the maximum expression of modernity.

There are so many possibilities that you have to take what suits you with your face cut, not take any novelty for being new.

I have always been interested in podcasts and one thing that interests me a lot now, and which is also very old, but which has had a kind of resurgence lately, is the

.

That they have a funny thing, which is like reinventing the newspaper, the newspaper within the newspaper.

But hey, it's those things at this crossroads of journalism that naturally is in perpetual motion.

That things are screwed up, especially work for many people, but that they also have the vice of the number of things that can be done today that could not be done yesterday.

The podcast: think about what the possibility of speaking on the radio was like many years ago, it was reserved for five men, and now any undocumented immigrant like me can dedicate himself to writing on the radio.

Another thing that fascinates me is the use of Artificial Intelligence, the GPT-3, or 5, I don't know where they are going anymore.

People trivialize them and make jokes, but these things can save you time on mechanical bullshit.

We journalists should study them calmly and attentively so that each time the work we do can be more creative and leave what is easy to the machines.

The easy must be left to the machines.

And what is easy in journalism? The easy thing is, I don't know, to put five or ten words into a machine and it will take out a

[intro].

And give you forty versions of headlines that fit in a given space.

You can dedicate yourself to specifying what is the word that effectively describes what you want to explain, but the mechanical question that the machine does.

What you have to do is refine your intelligence. Do you consider yourself a renovator of the newspaper? Without a doubt.

I consider myself a person whose field of intellectual work is journalism.

I take journalism in two ways: as a logical and conventional way of explaining facts, I'm not interested in fiction, and also as a reflection on journalism itself, on the way in which we tell things.

Because evidently journalism is still today the hegemonic mode of representation of reality.

Neither social networks nor tweets nor whatever.

We journalists have an obligation to reflect on the mechanisms that lead us to write.

Like Cervantes with the second part of the

, which explains what led him to write the first part.

The second is infinitely better than the first because he reflects on how to build it.

Journalism is a cultural object that needs to be examined very, very carefully.

And I've dedicated a lot of my career to that.

Does that reflection interest the reader?

Man, I think there is some interest, more than anything taking into account the

that my work has always received.

But as you know, that makes absolutely the same difference to me.

When one begins to think about the reader, one is already giving up sovereignty.

One has to write, and has to think, what seems right to one, naturally taking into account the inputs he receives throughout the day.

If you think about the audience, about the compensation, about the balance, about whether you are going to disturb... Then you're stuck and the best thing you can do is dedicate yourself to religion, to something where the offenses are perfectly scheduled. By the way What is the first episode of the podcast about? Oh, I don't know, because this is an interesting thing: I don't want it to have a script.

We run risks, and maybe it turns out to be a nuisance, and if so, to something else, butterfly.

But I don't want it to have a script, I want it to have a balance, difficult,

between the spontaneous and the interesting.

That the spontaneous is not banal.

Samuel Johnson said, in the biography that Boswell dedicated to him -a canonical book of Anglo-Saxon literature and one that I always have on my bedside table-, that conversation is the greatest of the challenges that an intelligence has.

It is one of those exaggerated phrases that should be qualified, but that is not without its share of truth.

A podcast doesn't exactly seem to me like a radio program as I understand it, with its scripts and such... And yes, Yaiza and I will come to the studio with an idea of ​​what we can discuss, but I would like it to be something that it flow, perfectly free, that is essential.

The theme of spontaneity runs the risk of being banal.

But hey, I have a community of listeners and readers that will know how to forgive me.

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